Offering permanent legal status a good step

This was supposed to be the year that Congress actually did something about a festering national problem: immigration.

It got halfway there after last year's elections spooked Republicans into realizing they'll become a permanent minority if their policies don't evolve with the nation's changing demographics.

A major immigration overhaul passed the Senate in June with bipartisan support, then languished in the House of Representatives.

The main holdup is that a segment of House Republicans simply can't abide creating a path to citizenship for the 11 million or so undocumented people in this country. As lengthy and arduous as the proposed path is, the critics say it amounts to "amnesty" for lawbreakers and would invite a wave of illegal immigration. Some also fear that citizenship would create millions of Democratic voters.

Recently, however, a number of Republicans - including former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who brokered the bipartisan budget deal that passed the House last week - have been exploring an alternative, one that would grant a path to permanent legal status, but not citizenship, to many of the 11 million.

The concept is far from ideal. It would create a new category of permanent resident whose members could stay indefinitely in the U.S. yet never become citizens. But if the choice is between no deal and one that provides legal status only, the latter is by far the better option.

The primary public interest in dealing with undocumented workers is not to create new citizens. Rather, it is to address problems associated with a class of people who want to avoid detection and therefore make such things as law enforcement, education and health care more problematic. For those purposes, legal status would work as well as citizenship.

Limited legal status, or any fix for illegal immigration, would allow less controversial and more important elements of reform to go through. These include fixes to the legal immigration system and the full implementation of the E-Verify program for checking the status of workers when they apply for jobs.

Perhaps the best argument for the plan is few among the 11 million undocumented workers are motivated primarily by citizenship, according to immigration advocates. Many just want to be free from the fear of deportation and to be able to re-enter the U.S. after visiting relatives abroad.

If Congress passes an immigration bill that provides only for legal status, a path to citizenship may come anyway. Republicans have already talked of granting a pathway to certain subgroups of the 11 million, most notably people who were brought here as children by their parents.

Once newly legalized residents could speak their minds without fear of being deported, they would probably begin to express their displeasure at being placed in a special category. And inasmuch as many of their friends and relatives would be voting U.S. citizens, their plight would likely grow as a political cause.

Legal status without citizenship may not be such a bad thing. As the expression goes, a half a loaf is better than none at all, especially if the other half might still come in time.

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Offering permanent legal status a good step

This was supposed to be the year that Congress actually did something about a festering national problem: immigration.